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When It Takes Three People to Make a Duet

PERHAPS it was a coincidence that Robert Plant chose a Russian tearoom called Trojka, which means a threesome or triumvirate, to talk about his new duet album with Alison Krauss, “Raising Sand.” Or maybe it was a subliminal reminder that the album is really a three-way collaboration by an improbable alliance: Mr. Plant, who will be forever known as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin; Ms. Krauss, whose clear voice and deft fiddle style hail from Appalachia; and the producer and guitarist T Bone Burnett, the Texan who is best known for concocting haunted, pensively anachronistic Americana.

They represent three different musical spheres: Mr. Plant’s worldly hard rock, Ms. Krauss’s limpid update of rural traditions and Mr. Burnett’s rangy Texas twang. “Raising Sand” (Rounder), all three say, is like nothing any of them could have made on their own. But Mr. Burnett saw a link between the singers: “They’re two very mystical voices, and the blend of them is mystical,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Los Angeles. “They both sound like they’re singing from some other time. Alison sounds like she just stepped out of the Black Forest, and Robert sounds like Ozymandias,” the Egyptian pharaoh.

With Mr. Burnett leading a malleable studio band, Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss share old and recent songs, drawing on Gene Clark, the Everly Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint, Mel Tillis and Tom Waits. It’s a collection of, mostly, sad songs — tales of love betrayed — floating in their own limbo. Together the collaborators triangulate a terra incognita somewhere between swamp and mountain, memories and eternity. Mr. Plant happily called it “the most amazing collision of styles.”

Sipping a latte and wearing a washed-out brown T-shirt that revealed robust biceps, Mr. Plant was far more eager to talk about “Raising Sand” than about the impending Led Zeppelin reunion. That concert is scheduled for Nov. 26 at the O2 arena in London as a benefit for a educational charity supported by Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Records until his death last year. “It’s a one-night stand,” Mr. Plant said. “I’m taking emotional condoms.” Then he changed the subject.

“Raising Sand” started as Mr. Plant’s project, the latest swerve in a long post-Zeppelin career that has delved into the wide-open-spaces rock of Mr. Plant’s 1983 hits “Big Log” and “In the Mood”; the reimagined vintage R&B of the Honeydrippers; and the rhythms and modalities of Mali and echoes of psychedelia in his current band, Strange Sensation.

“I think that Robert has always done exactly what he wants, and I mean that in a beautiful way,” Ms. Krauss said by telephone from her home in Nashville.

Mr. Plant has been a longtime fan of Ms. Krauss and her string band Union Station, which uses traditional instruments for music that’s steeped in old-timey and bluegrass styles but not bound by them. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland asked Mr. Plant to perform at a 2004 tribute to the bluesman Lead Belly, he invited Ms. Krauss to sing with him. The collaboration went so well that they began to consider recording together.

“Alison and I started talking about material,” Mr. Plant said. “We come from such different worlds that we only knew the top of each other’s world, the cream, the stuff that comes to the surface. We didn’t really know too much about the infinite myriad of influences underneath. And so it was an absolute coup that T Bone came on the scene.”

Ms. Krauss, 36, had already worked with Mr. Burnett on albums including the multimillion-selling, neo-Appalachian soundtrack album for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Mr. Plant and Mr. Burnett, who were both born in 1948, are connoisseurs of older American music who share a taste for the deepest blues.

Mr. Plant came to realize, however, that he had long focused on African-American music, while he had virtually ignored the other side of the racial divide, Ms. Krauss’s stomping ground and part of Mr. Burnett’s down-home foundations.

“I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about American music, but I’d missed out on an entire area,” Mr. Plant said. “I now know that American music is a total panorama. I was cutting it off and thinking it was redneck hell down there. But it’s not.”

Mr. Plant has spent decades as a lead singer, wailing across arenas as Led Zeppelin’s golden-haired belter and, since then, improvising at whim as the front man for his own bands. For “Raising Sand” he would have to harmonize as well.

Photo

Raising Sand, a duet album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, is a collection of mostly sad songs. Ms. Krauss and Mr. Plant, who were photographed last week in Nashville, are likely to tour with T Bone Burnett.Credit
Christopher Berkey for The New York Times

“I was quite nervous about the idea of finding out just how much of a one-trick pony I am,” he said. “I’ve always been a lead singer. That’s the gig, you know. Especially an English one. You translate usually black music, American music, in a particular fashion which is very English. But melody, and the structure of melody, I can be quite loose with.”

Harmony singing is Ms. Krauss’s element; it’s at the core of bluegrass and the vocal blend she shares in Union Station. Her “stretch” for the album, she said, was riding the rhythm. “It was really an ear-opening experience,” she said. “It’s just a different thing, singing with drums. You have to find a different place to sit.”

Mr. Plant said, “I wanted her to slur more, to become more sassy. She used to say to me, ‘But, Robert, I’m too white.’ I said: ‘No, you’re not white. You’ve only been given that shell. But inside it you’ve got everything.’ And she certainly does.”

As they planned the album, the three principals traded lists of potential songs. “Robert called up and said send five-six songs over, and I played him a couple,” Mr. Burnett said. “He said, ‘That’s a nice little ditty, but Alison wants to do something dark.’ And that was the starting point.”

Although none of the material on the album is new, Mr. Burnett insists there’s no nostalgia. “I think this album is looking into the skull of the present,” he said. “It represents all of the danger and the darkness and the outsiderness and the bleakness that seemed appropriate to this time.”

Mr. Plant brought his own countryish goodbye song, “Please Read the Letter,” and rock-tinged oldies like “Fortune Teller,” which was written by the New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint (under the pseudonym Naomi Neville), and “Gone Gone Gone,” a threat and kiss-off by the Everly Brothers.

When she saw one group of potential songs, Ms. Krauss recalled, she said she felt “I can’t do that.” She called Mr. Burnett, who she said told her, “You’ve called me and said you’re afraid. Robert has said sort of the same thing. And it’s exactly what I wanted to happen.”

The core of the band consisted of Mr. Burnett’s regular studio musicians, who know their way around all kinds of roots music. Despite Mr. Plant’s years of savoring American music “Raising Sand” is the first full album he has made with an American band.

The arrangements use silences and echoes with strategic grace; another factor, Mr. Burnett revealed, is the underlying rhythm. The songs often seem to hover because the beat is understated, elastic or only implied. “We’ve been getting completely away from the notion of beats and more into the notion of rumble or waves,” Mr. Burnett said.

Mr. Plant sings with barely a hint of arena bluster; his voice is aching and androgynous. Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’,” one of the most desolate songs ever written, has distorted guitar chords and Ms. Krauss’s biting Celtic fiddle looming up suddenly out of quiet dobro picking. In “Polly Come Home,” Gene Clark’s testament of utter loneliness, Ms. Krauss sings disembodied layers of harmony that drift around him like ghosts.

Ms. Krauss sings all alone on “Trampled Rose,” a parable of spurned love by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. And she sings lead in “Through the Morning, Through the Night,” a waltz about murderous jealousy written by Clark. Hearing a woman rather than a man sing, “To know that another man’s holding you tight/hurts me little darling” gives the song a bisexual twist, although Ms. Krauss was taken aback by the thought.

“It’s just leaving the song as it was written,” she said. “It wasn’t about anything other than the integrity of the song.”

Unlike Led Zeppelin, Mr. Plant, Ms. Krauss, Mr. Burnett and the band are likely to tour together. “I think the music will change a bit,” Mr. Plant said. “There’s lots and lots and lots of opportunities to do different things within this little format.” A mischievous grin crossed his face. “God only knows how it will affect her audience and my audience. They’ll go, ‘Hell, what’s going on?’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page AR227 of the New York edition with the headline: When It Takes Three People To Make a Duet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe